Matthew Yglesias writes:

When Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of Kamala Harris, the overwhelming majority of Democrats praised him for the decision and painted an overall flattering portrait of Biden’s presidency and his career. I think that was the right way to approach the situation. Voluntarily relinquishing a claim to power is a big ask, and the way to align incentives for the future is to praise people, like Biden, who do the right thing and criticize people who act like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But I found it increasingly painful to watch Democrats heap praise on Biden during the lame duck period and the Trump/Biden transition.

Of course, many good people served in the Biden administration. And the administration did a number of admirable things. But on a fundamental level, Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat to American political institutions. And he failed, catastrophically! It’s not just that Trump won, it’s that he has returned more powerful than before. It’s that we are genuinely much worse off than we would have been if Trump were narrowly reelected in 2020. It’s that Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America.

And in his lame-duck interviews, Biden expressed nothing but arrogance about his political and policy choices. He even boasted that he believes he’d have beaten Trump had he stayed on the ticket and seems to be nursing a grudge against Nancy Pelosi.

The sheer bad manners of talking Harris down like that was the last straw for me.

The obvious reality is that Biden and a relatively close circle of aids mislead many of their own appointees and fellow Democratic Party elected officials. They lied to the public, not convincingly enough to persuade most Americans, but convincingly enough to persuade most Democrats, and in the process, made their friends and supporters look ridiculous. They selected a VP nominee they didn’t have confidence in as a party leader and whom they did not set up to succeed. And they put the whole Democratic Party in a series of impossible situations because of their hubris, or vainglory, or I don’t know what. And I’m concerned that we’re now in a situation where the only people who want to say that publicly are either Republicans or, to a lesser extent, leftists.

There’s an urgent need for common sense Democrats to buck the establishment and admit what everyone knows: Biden fucked up, badly, in his handling of his age, and the effort to keep this under wraps seems to be related to some of the ideological failings of his presidency. [Continue reading…]